Your internet connexion drops when you connect any external device to your Macbook Pro touchbar ? The solution is completely insane but really works. Thanks to Joshua King you just have to wrap your dongles with tinfoil to make it work. Unbelievable. This prevents interferences.

If you’re using CM ToolTip glossary pro and noticed an abnormal decrease in page speed on your WordPress installation, that might be caused by an option set in CM ToolTip configuration. It came out my SQL database was full of transients, these entries created by some (usually bad coded) plugins to store data in order to increase SQL requests speed. It turned out the cache system used on CM Tooltip glossary did exactly the contrary in my case.

After few hours looking for a solution to my problem I’ve finally disabled the cache option as shown below :

Set the cache on off to avoid excessive transients creation in your SQL database

The site where it happened has few thousands of articles already published, so I’m guessing CM ToolTip glossary was parsing all of them when a user requested the page in order to find items that match the glossary index. SQL overload went so far that several hundreds of thousands transients were created and literally crashed my server after a while.

Clean transients manually and automatically

A plugin that really helped me to analyse how WordPress was reacting to these CM Tooltip glossary settings is Transient Cleaner. I strongly advise any wordpress user to use that plugin as a routine to periodically clean his database. Your site speed will feel the difference.

I also removed search engine plugin Ajax Search Pro, it doesn’t work that well for me and made really bad sql requests.

Confirming your bank account with Paypal can be a little bit disappointing sometimes. My last bad experience was about the amounts sent on my account that are supposed to be used through the confirmation process.

If Paypal sent you 0.06$ you have to enter 06 only. The text field used in their confirmation form is a two digits only and they don’t explain that. So don’t waste your time trying to enter 0.06, just use the last two digits (06 in this case) and you’re good to go.

Your site is not in english and you are trying to import an RSS feed by using the excellent Magpie RSS ? If the feed language is in french for instance you’ll probably get weird characters coming up on your display page.

The solution is pretty simple. Go in the folder where Magpie RSS is installed and look for rss_fetch.inc

Around line 357 set the default output and input encoding to UTF-8 like this :

That has to come one day. The famous commenting system that many WordPress administrators love has just announced that advertising will now come by default in its free version. If you want to remove theses ads, you’ll just have to pay 10$/month. A very fair way to thank its users who contribute to make the system famous.

Here’s the announcement :

Hi there,

We recently announced our plans for the new year including releasing new versions of Disqus with professional features. Disqus will always offer a free-to-use version that is supported by advertising. We are reaching out to you because you previously opted out of running advertising from Disqus.

Starting February 8, publishers running the free-to-use version of Disqus will be supported by advertising. Advertising will continue to be configurable for your site. We know that advertising is not the right fit for all publishers and that is why we are excited to offer publishers the option to pay a monthly subscription of $10 to remove advertising altogether.

We’d like to hear from you. If you are interested in the upgraded version of Disqus, please click below and we will reach out to you.

You like playing with similarWeb to track your competitors and compare your site with others? Well if you want to go further and access to the full features this amazing tool can provide, you’ll have to pull out thousands of dollars a year.

Here’s a little answer I received from them :

“SimilarWeb is on average $12,000. Exact pricing depends on how much data and which functions and features you would be needing.”

Well the answer is NO and that is a shame because both plugins are very professional and quite expensive. Therefore if you’re running a multi language site with WPML, please note that your articles in different languages will be added to your automatic newsletters !

The solution ? Send your newsletter manually by selecting the articles you want to include or drop MailPoet.

Just a quick note to mention few of my wordpress settings have been lost during the upgrade from SEO Ultimate (free version) to SEO Ultimate Plus (premium version). Even if the authors indicate that no settings will be lost during the process I have to say that was not my case at all.

I followed the basic tutorial they provide on their site, which consists of simply desactivating and removing the old plugin and then activate the new using the license key sent by email. Among things I’ve lost : Link mask generator entries, Main title tags and Deep links. Fortunately for me I had a backup and managed to recover by copy/pasting most of these lost settings. This may have been caused by another cache plugin (WP super cache) but I’m not too sure.

How to keep your previous settings from SEO Ultimate (free version)

2) go to Settings > Export > SEO Ultimate > get both the dat file and also export the deeplinks.

3) then, after you have the .dat file, deactivate SEO Ultimate and activate SEO Ultimate+

Then once you activate the license again, then go to Settings > Import > import the settings > import the deeplinks.

Anyway, if you’re wondering if the upgrade is necessary I would say yes as the classic free SEO Ultimate is apparently going depreciated. So it’s a kind of a forced update I would say. Considering Yoast as an alternative could be a good option if you’re tired of SEO Ultimate. I personally think it does the job though and it’s still an excellent plugin.

Additionally if you noticed that your Google Review Snippets don’t work anymore on your review articles then upgrade to the premium version and they will appear. Money magic.

A good customer service

SEO Ultimate Plus gives at least an excellent customer support. Emails are mainly answered by Jeffrey within 48 hours maximum, which is not that bad. I’m happy so far with all the answers I got from him. Some of my questions pointed out technical issues, such as the impossibility to get the Open Graph settings taken directly from the post itself without having to edit them manually each time you post something. Mass editing can also be a real pain if you have like me thousands of articles stored in your database.

Some of my feedbacks seem to have been taken into consideration for further updates. Let’s see how this plugin grows now it’s not free anymore.